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The book presents a never-before-written case study of the UK-based organisation Secret Cinema – widely considered the leading provider of large-scale immersive experiences in the UK. They are used as a lens through which to understand the wider experiential economy. The book provides a comprehensive and encyclopaedic history of the organisation and its productions. It defines and examines the Secret Cinema format. It critically interrogates the work and operations of Secret Cinema as an organisation and analyses the many layers of audience experience. It combines rigorous academic study with practical industry insight that has been informed by more than fifty in-depth interviews with Secret Cinema practitioners and sector professionals who have worked on immersive productions in areas including performance direction, acting, video design, sound design and composition, lighting design, special effects, stage management, operations and merchandising. Framed within the context of the UK in late-2019, at which point the immersive sector had grown significantly, both through its increasing contribution to UK GDP and its widespread and global recognition as a legitimate cultural offering, we have captured an organisation and a sector that is in transition from marginal and sub-cultural roots to a commodifiable and commercial form, now with recognisable professional roles and practices, which has contributed to the establishment of an immersive experience industry of national importance and global reach. This book will appeal to scholars, students, film fans, immersive experience professionals and their audiences. It is written in an accessible style with rich case study materials and illustrative examples.
a co-ordinated campaign – more of which later. Anderson (albeit in the British journal Sight & Sound ) had reiterated his familiar desire to stir things up, expressing pleasure that Glory! Glory! was more hard hitting than might have been expected. For this thanks were due to HBO which had been anxious to produce the kind of work that could not be seen on network TV. 62 In the USA, screen industry
, symphony orchestra, and musicals, with his studies ranging from Indian ragas and Pat Metheny to the Radiophonic Workshop and traditions of film music. Those principles around cultural and temporal diversity have contributed to Segun Akinola’s music for Doctor Who being not just remarkable within the programme’s 57-year history but significant within the prevailing tendencies in compositional practice for the dominant Anglophone screen industries and a model for practitioners in the future. Acknowledgements
and television shows, to the extent that the (hi)stories of America and the screen have been intertwined. The history of the screen in the US is certainly a particularly popular topic of enquiry. Rather than fully recap that story again, this section draws out three historical moments in the development of the ‘screen industry’ which raise important points for the analysis of the relationship between television and politics in the contemporary US. First, that film and television would become so utterly American was far from inevitable and relied upon a
policy. Its impact was also dramatic for the American screen industry. To begin with, the response to 9/11 created a range of new national characters in American politics and society, who were readily tied to the myths of nationhood that helped to bring the country together in the aftermath of the attacks. Infamously, Rudy Giuliani would be celebrated as ‘America’s mayor’. George W. Bush, seemingly on the ropes, found his voice atop the rubble of the World Trade Center, as he placed his arm around an exhausted firefighter and spoke to rescue workers through a
bringing with them the expertise and networks that shape the world's screen industries. Along with their partnership with Disney, this puts SC in a position of considerable influence and visibility among three of the five major global film studios. We have already seen how SC experience aesthetics have been co-opted by Disney and by others, evidencing the wider commercial value of the sites of innovation we have mapped in our ecosystem model. Whatever the specific future for Secret Cinema, in this book we have evidenced and analysed their profound
b ). Film exhibition development in the region is supported by Film Hub North, while Northern Film + Media promotes screen industries across the region. However, despite the largest city within the region, Newcastle, having three independent cinemas – Tyneside Cinema, Star and Shadow Cinema and Side Cinema – there are no major film festivals there. Nearby, the slightly smaller city of Sunderland has no independent cinema, but it hosts an annual short film festival. In contrast, large North Eastern towns such as Middlesbrough, Darlington and
–80 . 53 See Walker, Contemporary British Horror Cinema , 29–33. On the European context specifically, see Hunter, ‘Horrifically Local?’ 54 Kayleigh Dray, ‘Pandemic Horror Films: 17 Scary Movies that Hit a Little too Close to Home Right Now’ (no date), www.stylist.co.uk/life/best-pandemic-horror-movies-films-on-netflix-amazon-prime-itunes/378609 (accessed 12 March 2021). 55 British Film Institute, ‘Working in the Screen Industry during
advocate for ‘productions which contribute to building a sustainable screen industry in Northern Ireland and which can show a direct economic benefit to the region. Projects must be commercially viable and able to demonstrate clear possibilities for commercial exploitation’ (Northern Ireland Screen, 2017 ). At the time of writing, it is also difficult to predict how Brexit will affect filmmaking in Northern Ireland. One certainty is that they will lose access to funding from Creative Europe, an EU programme with an annual budget of almost €1.5 billion
finally ‘plenty’ – ‘an era in which television programmes … w[ould] be accessible through a variety of technologies’ (Ellis, 2000: 39).10 Revising at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century I find it necessary to propose a fourth phase. By the end of the 1990s a new dispensation had emerged which was unclear to me in the mid-1990s. It is, of course, part product of new geopolitical realities in which the USA has adopted a militaristic ‘World Police’ role.11 From the screen industries’ point of view, this period is one of technological convergences and